


Unintended Consequences (Ghost In the Shell Remix)

by Erinya



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-21
Updated: 2015-06-21
Packaged: 2018-04-05 09:36:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4174932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erinya/pseuds/Erinya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What might have gone differently if Fred was called as a Slayer during the events of "Chosen"?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unintended Consequences (Ghost In the Shell Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [M_Scott_Eiland](https://archiveofourown.org/users/M_Scott_Eiland/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Incidental Effects](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/122208) by M_Scott_Eiland. 



 

_“Concentrate on fighting.  Just hold on.”_

_“I’m not scared.  I’m not scared.  I’m not scared!”_

*     *    *

My essence knits to the shell's flesh, consumes it, transmutes it, strengthens the frail mortal form into a vessel fit for a God-King.  Pity it must remain still human-shaped and human-sized; how far I have fallen, how low I have been brought!  I who once dwarfed cities, leveled armies as they scattered in terror before me like the wind.  I who the other Old Ones feared.

But puny as it is, it is an elegant enough carapace.  And I have waited so long.

The mortal creature cries out one final time, pleading for life as mortals do.  It breathes its last.  The shell is mine, and time begins.

I am Illyria, God-King of the Primordium, and the world shall soon be mine again as well, as it is by right.

It is only as I fully awaken into my new form that I realize something has gone unconscionably wrong.

The shell is not empty.  Not quite.  Something else has been here before me.  Another essence.  Another...demon?

This cannot be!  It is lesser than me, weaker, younger.  It cannot stand before me, yet it does.  It should not have survived me, but it did.

“Hello,” it says brightly.  “My name is Winifred Burkle, and I am here to destroy you.”

*     *    *

_In a field of yellow wheat, she faces my true form, and she is unafraid; though the axe she holds makes no threat to my might, though I blot out the sun that blazes down from the wide blue bowl of the sky and she is but one small light against the shadow of my rising._

**What is this place?**

_"Why, it’s Texas, of course!  Or a memory of it.  I grew up here.  Beautiful, isn’t it?”_

_It is not, and this world is not how I remember it, so terrible and bright and swarming.  The hot wind races through the wheat, carrying the whispers of a billion tiny lives.  I can feel it drying out my skin already, my limbs shriveling at the edges, shrinking from the light.  This is why I need a shell._

_This is not my world, and the Primordium is long lost to time.  Its mud is stone now, buried deep beneath this surface; its denizens are dust.  Except for me._

**You should have died.  This was not meant to be.**

_“You’re right, it wasn’t,” she agrees, and shrugs.  “But--here we are.”_

**You are a demon.** _She is not only human, of this much I am sure.  A human soul would have dissolved along with its inferior flesh in the fires of my resurrection.  That is the way this was supposed to have been done.  My servants in this disappointing new world have much to answer for._

_“Actually,” Winifred Burkle says, “I’m a Slayer.”_

**What is “Slayer”?**

*     *    *

They were not used to waiting for news from troops on other fronts.

Angel had a champion-level brood going, leaning against the desk, arms crossed, glaring at the phone.  His posture was supposed to read as unconcern, but he was far too still for that.  Fred hadn’t seen him breathe all morning.  He forgot to, sometimes, when he was too upset.

Wesley appeared to be reading the same page of demon lore over and over.  Fred, trying to make conversation, asked him if he was reading up on the Ubervamps, but he just looked at her briefly like she was an alien from another dimension.  Which maybe she was. Texas was hardly less distant from this moment than Pylea. A different world, a different girl. Light-years and lifetimes away. 

Gunn was keeping himself busy cleaning his shotguns and sharpening blades.  Fred had started packing up the weapons for the move to Wolfram & Hart, but the news from Sunnydale had brought her efforts to a screeching halt. Gunn had undone the rest. 

Fred picked up an axe from his "sharpened" pile and hefted it in two hands, thinking about Angel’s words to them, about Buffy's charge, about being the second line of defense against apocalypse.  She’d faced down a lot of nasty during her time in L.A., but she didn’t think she could take down a Turok-Han, let alone stand against an army of them.  That axe was pretty heavy. 

She closed her eyes and prayed, a long-dormant habit from her childhood ( _please, whoever is out there, Powers that May Be, let the good guys win_ ).  If a strange shiver coursed through her and the axe seemed a little lighter in her sweaty grip, she didn’t think much of it.  Adrenaline could do funny things, and was scientifically far more likely to have an effect than the powers of prayer.

When the phone shrilled, they all jumped, even Angel.  And when, after a tense conversation heavy on the monosyllables and light on overhearable details, he put the phone down and said shortly, “It’s over.  They did it,” Fred let out what was perhaps the deepest sigh of relief she’d ever sighed in her life.

“Oh, thank goodness.  I thought I’d never get to put this thing down.”

The axe flew across the room and embedded itself in the wall.  The men's heads swiveled first to stare at it, then to her; she looked down at her hands. They seemed unchanged and not a stranger's hands at all: small and thin, fine blue veins running across the bones, just as she remembered. But surely her hands were not capable of that much force or that much damage. The head of the axe was mostly buried in wood and plaster; the handle vibrated a little. A little dust sifted down from the ceiling. She must have hit a stud.

“Well, that was unexpected,” Wesley commented, but when her eyes sought his, he would not meet them, and she thought that was odd.

“But...but...I was never a Potential!”

“The Powers work in mysterious ways?” Gunn suggested, but he, too, shifted his gaze away.

“What is going on?  What do you guys know that I don’t?  Angel?”

Angel shook his head.  “It’s as much of a surprise to me as to you.”  He frowned.  “Maybe I should give Buffy a call back…”

“Wesley?  Did you know this would happen?”

Wesley stood up behind the desk.

“We all made deals,” he said.  “It’s best not to ask for what.”

“You did this!  Or--Wolfram & Hart did.  Why?”

Wesley looked deeply uncomfortable.

“Well, you see,” he said.  “I discovered a prophecy…”

 *     *    *

_Into every generation a Slayer is born: one girl in all the world, a chosen one. She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness; to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their number._

“Except,” the essence of Winifred Burkle says slyly, “there’s not just one of us anymore.”

_Now, every girl in the world who might be a Slayer, will be a Slayer.  Every girl who could have the power, will have the power.  Can stand up--will stand up.  Slayers, all of us._

“It’s our world now,” the Fred-essence says.

**No...**

Demon essence magically fused with the bodies of human females.  Not so unlike my resurrection process.  There are hundreds of these Slayers, thousands even, and more born every day.  They are strong, fast, tough, and their singular purpose--

“We were made to kill you.”

**This is why your human mate bargained to change your fate.  To destroy me.**

“He’s not my mate,” Fred says, and a strange sensation floods the shell, bitterness and ache; she names it “sadness.”

**That is foolish.  Your essences have mixed.  Time cannot change these things.  It never has, not even when the world was mine.**

“Anyway, he didn’t do it to destroy you.  He did it to save me.”

*     *    *

There was a Slayer army in the lobby, and Fred was mad as hell.

“I already told you.  I'm not going with them! My friends are all here. _You're_ here. I'm staying.”

“Come on, Fred.  Don’t fight this.  You belong with them now.  They can train you, teach you about your powers--”

“That’s why you did this?  To send me away?”

“Listen, you must trust me.  It was for the best.  I swear to you.”

“And what gave you the right to decide? Just who do you think you are, Wesley?  My Watcher?  Is that who you want to be to me?”

That knocked him back a step, as if she’d thrown a punch.  And honestly, she was thinking about it.   _No_ \--that wasn’t her!  But a thirst for violence came more easily to her now, like an instinct she’d never realized she had.

_Because I didn’t have it._

“I am no one’s Watcher,” Wesley said, brittle-voiced.  “I didn’t know they would make you a Slayer.  The deal was that they would keep you from becoming a--” He swallowed, cleared his throat.  “A sacrifice.  That was what they meant you to be, before this.  Please, Fred…”

She stared at him; his face was drawn and white with strain.  It was the face of a man she had once just begun to love, who certainly believed that he loved her.

“Show me the prophecy,” she said, finally.

 *     *    *

“I didn’t choose to become a Slayer,” the shell-essence says, idly testing the edge of her axe.  “But I did choose this.”

**I do not understand.**

“Wesley hoped that my becoming a Slayer would change what was already written.  But if I had gone away and joined up with Buffy’s army, someone else, someone weaker, would have been chosen to become your vessel.  And I couldn’t let that happen.”  

**You knew what would come when you opened the sarcophagus.  You chose to be the sacrifice.  The act of a warrior.**

Fred laughs, light and carefree.  “Well, of course I did, silly.  What’s the point of being a Slayer if you let other people fight the apocalypse for you?”

**Courageous, yet meaningless.  You are already dead.  Your human soul is lost.  This shell is bound to me now.**

“And you are bound to it, isn’t that right?”

**Correct.  You cannot destroy me without destroying yourself--**

Time seems to stop, then, dragging to a halt in the space of what would be, for a mortal, a single breath.

For the first time, Illyria, the God-King of the Primordium, feels true fear.

“That’s what I’m counting on,” says Winifred Burkle's ghost.

*     *    *

In a darkened room, stale with the smell of sickness and death, a man is holding the body of his beloved in his arms and weeping.

“Please,” he says, a broken murmur.  “Please...”

He does not see her eyes change:  ice-blue now, struck by a sudden deep freeze.  Then her body shudders violently, seizing, throwing them both to the floor.

Illyria rises.

_Remember our deal_ , the Fred-essence whispers.   _You will raise no armies.  You will not try to rule this world.  You will protect him._

The Old One stretches in her new shell.  She looks upon the man who worshiped Winifred Burkle while she lived, upon his fear and his despair; perhaps he will worship her now.  It would be good to be worshiped again.

This may not be her world, after all, but she has waited so long for this, to feel the pull of time like the tides of the Primordium, to walk the Earth again and feel it tremble.

“This will do,” the God-King says.  

  



End file.
